Looks
like my iPod is fried. I have one
with some 150Gs of music on it that acts like a library. It gave out when we were on holiday in
Portugal and I credited it to the fact that the chargers we had were no
good. But when I got home nothing
seemed to work to bring it back to life.
Visiting the Apple Store yesterday, they confirmed it was not only dead
but out-of-warranty, as well.
“You’d best get a new one” they advised. I’d never had any problem with it before, though upon deeper
reflection it may well have been that complementary bottle of wine I brought
from the hotel that spilled in my backpack on the drive up to Porto. Even when you don’t ingest it,
complementary wine has a way of causing problems.
On any other trip, suddenly winding up without tunes would
be a major disaster. But these
days I sync so much to my Rdio app in on my iPhone, it was only a minor
annoyance. Since I’ve been back I
missed it because I use it when I head to the gym. My phone has all this new jazz, mostly that I’ve been
discovering and writing about. But
that’s not usually what I need at the gym. Rather, I require fuel-injection. And so I paused the other day and downloaded a bunch of old
friends. It’s not the same as
having my whole library handy, but for now this will do. And, as Apple intended, it may
ultimately serve to make my needing to have two devices, a thing of the
past.
Hendrix and The Who aren’t just for the gym anymore
either. My guilty pleasure is to turn
up the meager car stereo to as far as it will go (“40” is somehow the limit) and
roll down the windows in the late summer and force anyone within earshot to
confront Keith Moon’s drumming along with me. I’m not going to feature The Who today, because I’ve already
done so, and rules are rules. But
I will say that it has been such a pleasure reintroducing the story of “Tommy”
to my little one. I’d tried to do
this with only modest success years ago and while the older one has some
recollection the younger does not.
I played “It’s a Boy” for her on the ride to school and
immediately she was hooked with the basic tale: “Why is he blind, deaf and dumb?” “He saw the murder of his father. Then his mother and stepfather
yelled at him to forget it.” So,
driving downtown yesterday, in ferocious deluge, we could continue onward into
the story, with the “Amazing Journey” and beyond. Her north-of-neutral interest was similarly water, on my
parched, paternal landscape that wants them to like all the music I like.
We were heading to a party for my niece. She heads off today for America, to
begin a four-year undergrad program at Michigan State. I wish I could help her with my broad
network there in East Lansing, but alas, I don’t I know anyone who lives in the
state of Michigan. Beyond the
Detroit airport, I’ve only ever been there once, when I was also visiting a
different university in Ann Arbor.
On the one hand, she is a mere statistic: another Chinese student,
heading off America. Part of the rising tide of Chinese affluence and
aspiration that is changing everything, including American higher
education. And, of course, she is
also my family, someone I met when she was two. Someone who is shy, and confident, and doesn’t know much of
anything about America, much less East Lansing, but is going to get off a plane
tomorrow in Detroit and make her way off to school, conflating her Chinese and
her new American dream.
My sage-like annoyance that I had to share, which is
something I’ve told her before, countless times, was: “Please, make friends with non-Chinese speakers. If you get through this year without a
non-Chinese speaking friend, you’ve failed.” When I was her age, I’d never left the country and didn’t have
a passport. My first adventurous
trip overseas a few years later, was to England and Ireland, which took
ever-so-much courage given the language and cultural challenge that pales
before what she is staring down.
My family in New York don’t know it yet, but I’m flying her out to New
York for Thanksgiving, so she doesn’t have to sit in a dorm eating instant
noodles with all the other Chinese kids, during the Thanksgiving Holiday.
Oh yeah, rules are rule. I’m listening to the lovely lady behind the voice I’d heard
countless times on the radio, Marian McPartland. I don’t think I ever really sat down and listened to hear
playing before. I’ve a beautiful
album of hers from 1956 entitled “After Dark”, the song is the moody “Chelsea
Bridge.” Born in Slough, England
in 1918, at the end of World War I, she was told she’d never record, because she
was a ‘she’ and white and British.
Fortunately that was a 似是而非[1] There are nearly fifty sessions of recordings
there, credited to her discography.
I always heard her discussing jazz in such a dignified way with other
musicians on the radio, it is great to explore her work, itself. A familiar voice, from when I
last lived in the U.S. I hadn’t realized that she passed last year, back nearby
to where I’m from, there in Port Washington New York. I’ll see if I can get my girls to check her, and her “Amazing
Journey” out this morning.
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